bike culture blogged

I imagine Lemond is somewhere saying, “how ya like me now!” Portrayed as the bitter old champion, not given his due props, and the dude has been out saying all along that there were two speeds in the peloton: that he lost and left because he couldn’t keep up with the dopers. And this week, Zabel, Bolts admit doping. Today, Riis is expected to admit it – Musueew busted, who else? Don’t forget Lance’s contemporaries as well.

All this reminds me of the el dope penis graffiti you can catch a glimpse of during the mountain Stages of the Tour on OLN.

The sport is farcical now and it seems that bitter old man Lemond was right. He should be saying how ya like me now!

Update

See other posts tagged:

8 Comments

Dude, this whole house of cards is collapsing. I’d love to believe Lemond didn’t dope, but who knows. Lance? Floyd? Hampsten? BigMig (how does someone so big go up mountains so fast?)? Eddy? (of course back then it wasn’t doping so much as SOP)... sigh.

I’m afraid UCI/WADA etc will use this latest admission as a sign that they are doing the correct thing with their current efforts, policies, etc and make a pitch for even more funding. I can see it now, Dick Pound, King of the World.

For what it’s worth I’m pretty sure Floyd was on something—though not just for s17. However, and call me a bleeding heart if you want, I still believe if a real judicial process, innocence before proven guilty, and all those hallmarks of the American justice system we enjoy. If nothing else, the Landis hearings have shown those jokers are really incompetent. I wouldn’t want my career in their hands (Or my cancer results, or my life insurance blood test or whatever). I personally would rather have the tour won by a doper than have a single athlete’s careeer ruined by false allegations.

If WADA and the boys really wanna clean things up—and don’t get me wrong, this admission and the others PROVE a huge problem exists—they need to be just as hard on the labs, doping administrators, and the process, as they are on suspected athletes.

I’ve been talking about this in instant messages all morning and I think the teams have figured out, faced with economic ruin, that it’s time to admit it, come clean, and recover. In comparison, baseball player Jason Giambi actually did admit to doping, but the league told him to shut up or lose his legal protection.

This is coming from cancelled races, sponsors balking, and I suspect Basso has reverberated much more than we’re reading. That’s a preeminent team who’ll believe in a rider only to have it discovered he was a liar.

I’ve also heard that sponsors are requiring doping clauses to their funds—they’ll fund a team, but if a doping allegation comes down, they get the money back.

Just how do you recover from something like this? I mean, the fact that many of the things riders take they can’t test for yet, that alone presents a huge challenge for rebuilding this sport. Shorten the race distances? Fewer races? Live in a bubble? It’s hard to look at any pro, any pro sport, without skepticism these days. Frustrating…

We’re seeing it stateside with canceled races. I wouldn’t expect it to affect the racing club scene or local races, but we’ll probably go from live daily Tour coverage to a 2 hour wrap up on Sunday. If we’ve got another contender at the Tour, like Levi, that’ll put it back right.

setting the doping thing aside for a second and going back to lemond…i don’ think that doping in the peleton was the only reason lemond stopped winning. lemond got cheneyed by his brother-in-law while hunting and supposedly the lead shot in his body eroded his body. that and the fact that he put on a lot of weight during the winter long before jan “the pie eater” ulrich turned that into a fashion trend.

LeMond is anything but bitter, and the media did him and the sport a terrible disservice by swallowing and perpetuating that lie. If you go back to the source and read (or better yet listen, in case of TV/radio interviews), you get an impression of a solid, thoughtful guy who genuinely loves pro cycling and doesn’t like what he sees happening to it.

Besides, I find it laughable that the American press was playing up the “Lance is about to pass his Tour record” angle. Guess they never heard of Anquetil, Merckx, Indurain or Hinault.

Greg Lemond bears the brunt of your anger because he stood up and told the truth. A truth most of do not want to believe.

Mr Lemond could have remained silent, he could have simply shut up and he would have stood to benefit greatly. Instead he challenged us to open our minds regarding the state of cycling on the professional level and how cycling really works.

I have at times been critical of his commentary, however I do not think a man who stands up in public and says what he thinks, means what he says and is willing to pay the price for it, is any less of a champion and he is someone to be admired.

It takes balls to tell the emperor he has no clothes. Regardless of how much you do not like what comes out of his mouth, he is stating his perspective, a perspective of someone who is intimate with the inner workings of our sport.

It sad to me that we, myself included, have attacked a mans integrity out of ignorance of the truth, we go by what is reported in the media. The media has a habit of misconstruing information and placing comments out of context.

Mr Lemond deserves our respect and support, not our contempt. He wants our sport to be clean and those who participate to not cheat, what is wrong with that? If he calls out those who need to be called out and aligns himself with those he believes have the best interest in cycling in mind, he is only doing what any of us would do to defend something we believe in.

For all any of us know, he could be the only one telling the truth, or do we not care about that anymore?